Researchers have discovered a second instance of suspected Russian hackers repurposing iOS exploits believed to originally be made on behalf of the U.S. government, pointing to what they say are several foreboding trends.
iVerify, Lookout and Google collaborated on the research published Wednesday, a follow-up to earlier revelations about a similar exploit kit, Coruna. While the second kit — dubbed Darksword — also targeted users in Ukraine, the scale is significant: iVerify estimated up to 270 million iPhone users could be susceptible, while Lookout told CyberScoop roughly 15% of all iOS devices currently in use are running iOS 18 or earlier versions and could be vulnerable to the exploit kit.
The research reveals a range of new details, as well as interesting patterns:
- Whereas Russian and Chinese hackers used Coruna with financial gain in mind, there are signs Darksword could serve both financial and surveillance purposes, and/or could be used to inflict harm.
- Lookout observed that someone used a large language model to customize both Coruna and Darksword.
- The discovery of Darksword reinforces earlier concerns about a secondary exploit market, Lookout and iVerify said.
- Darksword is the second “mass” iOS campaign discovered this month, with the first known one to be Coruna.
- Both kits suggest cyberattacks are migrating toward mobile phones as they make up a bigger portion of internet traffic, Rocky Cole, iVerify’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told CyberScoop.
Darksword can exfiltrate saved passwords, crypto wallets, text messages and more, researchers found. Attackers are leveraging the exploit kit by first compromising Apple’s WebKit and then using WebGPU as a pivot point for sandbox escapes, according to Justin Albrecht, Lookout’s global director for mobile threat intelligence.
What’s less clear is who, exactly, is behind the exploit kit, other than the links to Russia. Cole said Darksword is hosted on the same command and control infrastructure as Coruna, but is an entirely separate kit made by entirely separate people. Google has attributed the campaigns to a group it tracks as UNC6353, which it describes as a Russian-backed espionage group.
The attackers’ motives are also a bit opaque, mixing what appears to be both espionage and financial objectives. Albrecht noted there is precedent for this: Russian threat groups have targeted cryptocurrency in Ukraine before, notably with Infamous Chisel, an Android exploit kit deployed by Sandworm.
“They’re probably well-funded, probably well-connected, but it’s confirmed that they’re stealing crypto. There is definitely a financial motivation,” Albrecht told CyberScoop. “Now, I think the big question is, depending on who the group is, is the financial motivation in this just to do damage to Ukrainians, or is it to steal crypto?”
Russia has been under heavy sanctions for a long time and is starting to have budget problems due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, he noted. “Why not start to fund their operations with stolen funds? It wouldn’t be outside the norm, although it would be a potential shift in their TTPs for Russian APTs in general,” Albrecht said.
The kit could be handy for someone trying to do a “pattern of life” analysis, Cole said, and thus useful for surveillance and intelligence purposes.
He said a commercial spyware vendor might have made the kit with no target audience in mind, thus the “Swiss Army knife”-like quality of it. The major concern for Cole is that there’s apparently a growing market for these kinds of tools, and people may be lulled into a false sense of security about iPhones not being vulnerable.
Despite the sophistication of the exploits themselves, the threat actors behind Darksword may not be particularly experienced, Albrecht said. None of the JavaScript or HTML code was obfuscated in any way, and the server-side component was labeled “Dark sword file receiver” — poor operational security for a seasoned Russian threat actor.
“Your experienced Russian threat actors, your APT29’s of the world, I would expect them to have better OPSEC,” Albrecht said.
One of the more unusual findings in the research is the clear presence of large language model-generated code. The server-side component of Darksword, for instance, includes telltale signs of AI-generated code, complete with detailed notes and comments characteristic of LLM output. It’s a development that effectively lowers the barrier to entry for deploying advanced mobile exploits, even among state-sponsored actors, Albrecht said.
All three research teams have been in contact with Apple about the findings, according to Albrecht, with Google likely in closest contact since they began investigating the threat in late 2025. Google did not make its research available to CyberScoop prior to publication.
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